Presence

I recently had to give a keynote speech at a university fundraising gala. I've given more talks than I could remember, but this time I was a bit nervous. I had no slide deck or notes to lean back against. It was just me baring my soul before the audience.

Unlike animals, human beings have successfully developed the capacity to think about what is not immediately going on around them and to contemplate events that happened in the past or might possibly happen in the future. While this capacity called imagination can be a blessing, it can be a curse at the same time.